I think it’s the idea that protecting your daughter = insuring she never has any kind of sexual contact with anyone, ever, and that a sixteen year old who fondled your 16-year old daughter’s boobs in the backseat of a Ford Focus has done you harm in some way.
It is creepy. I don’t have a daughter, but I am a daughter, and I have gotten vibes of this from my dad. I also got way more than vibes from uncles and cousins. The idea that MY sexuality for generations has been put in the hands of my male protectors is heinous. The idea that I should spend X amount of years resisting sex and even not liking it is disgusting, and then one day cheerfully submit to my husband and is not a Hindu ideal at all - I firmly believe this is because the British were in my country for 400 years and changed our way of thinking.
Maybe you men should be raising your teenage sons as less “uncouth horndogs” and stop only laying the responsibility and the blame on your daughters. Because that’s what it comes down to, basically - the young sons can’t control themselves, so we have to. I am not responsible for the bad way you raised your son. Raise him to be a respectable gentleman and things might be different.
And don’t ever, ever tell me teenage girls aren’t horndogs.
On that theme, I came here to suggest that teenage boys, while horney, can be raised to be raised to have self-control and respect for girls. I witnessed it as a girl dating, and I include fostering such behavior as a component of raising my sons.
Whenever I hear some man braying about his daughter not dating til she’s 30, I think it says a lot about his behavior as a teen, and lack of restraint.
The problem is that the stakes can be pretty high in high school: pregnancy and STDs, hard drug abuse, dropping out, etc. There are real sociopaths out there that get off on the idea of convincing their girlfriend to have sex with their best friend or of goading their boyfriend into committing a crime. Some things are very hard to “pick yourself up” from. It’s easy to say “well, I’d teach my kid never to do those things and give him/her the confidence to tell someone to fuck off”, and 99% of the time that’s enough, but their are kids out there that are just really really good at being manipulative and who are also truly evil. Having a blanket hands-off policy would be as misguided, in my opinion, as having a blanket “no dating” policy.
There need be no such thing as “blanket hands off.” But, again, communication must be a well-established habit well before the teen years. (Not that either of the girls ever discussed their dating situations with me, but they were much more open with their mother, and my wife and I have been known to talk to each other on occasion.)
You know how they act, but you don’t know how they think. I do. I wouldn’t let a teenage boy anywhere near my daughter, if I had one. Easy to say because I don’t.
I do have sons, and I had to worry about them, because now-a-days teenage girls are acting like teenage boys.
Anyway, as far as most dad’s and their feelings about their daughters, most of this is just emotional venting. If I had a daughter she’d probably have me wrapped around her little finger and I’d have to let her go out with boys. I’d just pull them aside and calmly explain how I’d cut their nuts off with a rusty knife if they touched by daughter.
I like to think that in many cases what you are seeing as possessiveness is actually protectiveness.
^^^^ this. applauds
But why do girls have to be “protected” from being touched?
Girls don’t. My hypothetical daughter does. I’d like other fathers to encourage their daughters to be sluts.
See, that last sentence is an example of how guys think.
Does that reflect a general principle for all decisions that affect teenage girls, or is it something unique about sex?
It’s simple biological fact that sex carries greater consequences for women than for men. If a couple of stupid, horny teenagers have sex, either one or both might end up with a broken heart, but only one of them might end up pregnant. Because of this, it makes sense that parents would be more protective of daughters than of sons, when it comes to sex.
Now, this can obviously be taken to unreasonable extremes. But I think that most of the talk of “not dating until she’s 30”, or “I have a shotgun and know how to use it” is deliberate and self-aware hyperbole. The guy who says his daughter won’t date until she’s 30 probably does actually know and accept that, realistically, she’s probably going to start dating in her mid-teens. But he’s at the least uncomfortable with that fact, and so comically exaggerates his discomfort.
I am no anthropologist, but this claim surprises me. Women were not considered property, and virginity a prized possession, in India before the British?
It’s not creepy. Maidens need to be protected
If that’s all it is then mothers should have the same attitude about it as fathers. Plus it can have greater consequences for boys, because a girl might decide to have an abortion if she got pregnant, and a boy might want the girl to have an abortion but it won’t be up to him. Do you think it would change most possessive fathers’ attitudes if they knew their daughter would have an abortion? And if he knew his son had a prolife girlfriend?
Thinking, “Gosh I sure hope my daughter doesn’t have sex when she’s young or at least is really careful about it” is a lot different than claiming you’ll take any boy who dates your daughter aside and threaten him. For the latter I don’t think it really has anything to do with the possibility of pregnancy.
That’s utter bollocks. We banned suttee, remember? And that was a Hindu ideal.
And Britain has apart from a short period amongst the upper and middle classes in the Victorian and Edwardian* eras generally been pretty permissive sexually by contemporary or even modern standards.
*But not Edward himself. You should see some of his fellatio seats!
This doesn’t follow for me. I mean, I can understand thinking “I don’t want my daughter getting pregnant because then she’s at the mercy of some boy who might or might not step up and shoulder the burden equally to get them all through what’s going to be a very tough time”. But I am not going to think “It’s not THAT big of a deal if my son knocks up some slut who thinks she can make him really love her if she gets pregnant because he’s got the option to bail”.
Men in general may not have a biologic requirement to step up to the plate if they create a baby, but my son in particular does–or at least, if he doesn’t, he’s abandoning my grandchild, and that’s going to seem like an even worse tragedy than the fact of the grandchild in the first place.
I think the “but she can get pregnant” thing can be a fig-leaf over a broader double standard–I don’t think the guys that are saying “Don’t touch my daugther, you horndog boy!” would feel better if they were reassured it was all blow-jobs and anal sex, or that their daughter was on birth control.
I tend to agree with you that it’s mostly teasing and not really that big of a deal, but I do think some of the “my girls need to be maidenly virgins and all the other women can be sluts” talk suggest some attitudes towards female sexuality that seem pretty anachronistic to me: as I said above, there’s shades of the whole virgin/whore thing, and the idea that a girl is diminished by her own sexuality.
I have a daughter, and for me it’s not the sex (unless I think about it :o ), but some of the other aspects of her relationships. I just want her to be secure enough to demand that her relationships are on an equal footing and that she is treated well and not hurt. I don’t want to see her going with some loser donk because she thinks she can’t do better. All I’m doing is being good to her and my wife as an example and trying to make sure she has the opportunity to know what it’s like succeed on her own merits. That’s more effective than bodyguarding.
There might be an evolutionary factor in all this. Men may have evolved to protect their daughters from engaging in sex at too early an age for a variety of reasons. And unreasonable thoughts about protecting their daughters are just the result of men living in the modern world. It’s also why men are driven beyond reason to reproduce, and men know that about the guys their daughters are seeing. Guys don’t act on every impulse that strikes them any more than women do, so it’s not fair to characterize the impulses they can’t help as part of some larger agenda.
I, a father of (young) daughters, find that stuff creepy as hell. The shotgun jokes, the purity balls, the whole thing. Their sexuality (when they’re older) isn’t mine, it’s theirs. They can do with it what they wish.
–Cliffy